Our New Pharmacovigilance Specialist

I’d like to introduce you to Jared Fink, who works for my firm as a Pharmacovigilance Specialist. What is a Pharmacovigilance Specialist, you ask? Well, every pharmaceutical company in the world has a team of folks who scour medical literature, the Internet, and other sources to look for signs that their drugs are causing harm. The men and women in those positions scour the medical literature and brief management on new and existing trends in product safety. They then prepare internal reports with candid assessments of whether they think a given study is important enough to merit further investigation. In other words, a Pharmacovigilance Specialist acts as the eyes and ears of a pharmaceutical company with respect to the medical community.

Jared does the same sort of work for us. He spends his days going through current and some not-so-current medical studies to determine what the risks are of drugs and medical devices on the market. If he believes that a drug or device is more dangerous than the manufacturer lets on, he lets us know and we investigate whether or not we want to file lawsuits against the manufacturer of the drug or device. And if we’re already sure we want to pursue a certain type of lawsuit, Jared helps us find the appropriate scientific evidence to back up our cases.

A big part of Jared’s job is summarizing lengthy and complicated scientific studies about drugs and medical devices. I don’t want all of his hard work to stay buried in our private network, so I have Jared blog about his findings. I think you’ll find that Dangerous Drugs has the most in-depth analysis of the science behind the lawsuits and most of that analysis comes from Jared. It’s important to me that Jared’s work is published on the open Internet because many of the studies he reviews are not published on the open Internet. Instead, they’re buried behind the pay walls of academic journals and are not accessible to the average citizen.

Jared Fink graduated with honors from The College of Wooster, where he received a Bachelor’s of Arts in Philosophy. In addition to his senior thesis project titled “Authenticity and Art,” which resulted in a 96-page thesis with oral defense, as an undergraduate Jared managed genetics research for Dr. Amy Jo Stavnezer of the Neurology Department at the College of Wooster. For five summers, Jared worked in psychiatric research at the University of Michigan under Dr. Israel Liberzon, where his research focused on the neurobiological and genetic foundations for a number of psychiatric conditions.

I learn a great deal every time I read one of Jared’s blog posts, and I’m sure you will, too.

About this Blog

This blog chronicles legal and scientific news relating to personal injuries caused by defective drugs and medical devices. It is published by injury lawyer Justinian C. Lane, an attorney who takes a personal interest in each of his clients’ cases.